Design Patterns for Cloud Native Applications

Chapter 2. Communication Patterns

Cloud native applications comprise a collection of microservices that are connected with one another, as well as external systems, through interservice communication techniques. With the proliferation of microservices and ever-increasing business requirements, building robust communication among microservices in cloud native applications is one of the hardest challenges in cloud native architectures.

This chapter will give you a broad understanding of the communication patterns and implementation technologies that you can use to build cloud native applications. These patterns can be used to build communication among microservices, other external systems, and consumer applications such as mobile and web apps. In this chapter, we focus mainly on foundational communication patterns for synchronous and asynchronous communication.

In synchronous communication, one microservice invokes another microservice and expects a response within a given time frame. For this, we use patterns such as Request-Response and Remote Procedure Calls (RPC). In asynchronous communication, microservices communicate by passing messages asynchronously with the help of an intermediary (known as a message broker), and we use patterns utilizing queue-based messaging and publisher-subscriber messaging. In most real-world cloud native applications, we can mix and match these communication patterns.

In addition to these foundational communication patterns, we’ll also explore patterns ...